This can't be the end of human evolution. We have to go someplace else.

It's quite remarkable. It's moved people off of personal computers. Microsoft's business, while it's a huge monopoly, has stopped growing. There was this platform change. I'm fascinated to see what the next platform is going to be. It's totally up in the air, and I think that some form of augmented reality is possible and real. Is it going to be a science-fiction utopia or a science-fiction nightmare? It's going to be a little bit of both.

JOHN MARKOFF is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covers science and technology for The New York Times. His most recent book is the forthcoming Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots. John Markoff's Edge Bio Page

THE NEXT WAVE

I'm in an interesting place in my career, and it's an interesting time in Silicon Valley. I grew up in Silicon Valley, but it's something I've been reporting about since 1977, which is this Moore's Law acceleration. Over the last five years, another layer has been added to the Moore's Law discussion, with Kurzweil and people like him arguing that we're on the brink of self-aware machines. Just recently, Gates and Musk and Hawking have all been saying that this is an existential threat to humankind. I simply don't see it. If you begin to pick it apart, their argument and the fundamental argument of Silicon Valley, it's all about this exponential acceleration that comes out of the semiconductor industry. I suddenly discovered it was over.

Now, it may not be over forever, but it's clearly paused. All the things that have been driving everything that I do, the kinds of technology that have emerged out of here that have changed the world, have ridden on the fact that the cost of computing doesn't just fall, it falls at an accelerating rate. And guess what? In the last two years, the price of each transistor has stopped falling. That's a profound moment.

It is definitely the golden age in cosmology because of this unique confluence of ideas and instruments. We live in a very peculiar universe—one that is dominated by dark matter and dark energy—the true nature of both of these remains elusive. Dark matter does not emit radiation in any wavelength and its presence is inferred by its gravitational influence on the motions of stars and gas in its vicinity. Dark Energy, discovered in 1998, meanwhile is believed to be powering the accelerated expansion of the universe. Despite not knowing what the dark matter particle is or what dark energy really is, we still have a very successful theory of how galaxies form and evolve in a universe with these mysterious and invisible dominant components. Technology has made possible the testing of our cosmological theories at a level that was unprecedented before. All of these experiments have delivered very exciting results, even if they're null results. For example, the LHC, with the discovery of the Higgs, has given us a lot more comfort in the standard model. The Planck and WMAP satellites probing the leftover hiss from the Big Bang—the cosmic microwave background radiation—have shown us that our theoretical understanding of how the early fluctuations in the universe grew and formed the late universe that we see is pretty secure. Our current theory, despite the embarrassing gap of not knowing the true nature of dark matter or dark energy, has been tested to a pretty high degree of precision.

It's also consequential that the dark matter direct detection experiments have not found anything. That's interesting too, because that's telling us that all these experiments are reaching the limits of their sensitivity, what they were planned for, and they're still not finding anything. This suggests paradoxically that while the overall theory might be consistent with observational data, something is still fundamentally off and possibly awry in our understanding. The challenge in the next decade is to figure out which old pieces don't fit. Is there a pattern that emerges that would tell us, is it a fundamentally new theory of gravity that's needed, or is it a complete rethink of some aspects of particle physics that are needed? Those are the big open questions.

PRIYAMVADA NATARAJAN is a professor in the Departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University, whose research is focused on exotica in the universe—dark matter, dark energy, and black holes. Priyamvada Natarajan'sEdge Bio Page.

THE EXQUISITE ROLE OF DARK MATTER

I'm a theoretical astrophysicist, working on what I think are some of the most exciting, open and challenging questions. The first is trying to understand the nature of dark matter, and the second question pertains to the physics of black holes. Part of my interest in these two questions, aside from the fact that we now have an enormous amount of data that can help us understand these very enigmatic objects in the universe, is that we have a standard theory—a theoretical model—that works extremely well.

This is a model of structure formation in which dark matter, which is the dominant matter component in the universe, is in the driving seat. It's the scaffolding in which all the first galaxies form, the first stars form, and so on. While we have this exquisite inventory and role for dark matter, we do not know what it is, what it's composed of, what kind of particle it is, when it was created in the universe, and so on and so forth. Similarly, with black holes; we know that they exist. They are real. There is one in the center of our galaxy, which is a few million times the mass of the sun. The one in the center of our galaxy is a dormant black hole. It's not doing very much at present, it was likely active in the past. We see in the early universe that there are massive black holes that are 1000 times, 10,000 times more massive than the one in the center of the galaxy that play a very important role in shaping the properties of the galaxy which hosts them.

What is the life-story of a black hole? How do they grow? How do they form, evolve, and then end up as dead black holes? This is an open question because we know that black holes feed on gas, but what we don't understand is precisely how the gas makes it onto this peculiar surface that all black holes have called the "event horizon." The physics, the astrophysics, if you will, or the details of the flow, are very poorly understood. Once again, these are both problems where we have a good, in fact, a rather specialized, detailed broad-brush understanding; however, the very nature of these objects remains unknown. The situation is very similar to that of dark matter that appears to be ubiquitous.

We know there's a law of nature, the second law of thermodynamics, that says that disorderliness grows with time. Is there another law of nature that governs the complexity of what happens? That talks about multiple layers of the structures and how they interact with each other? Embarrassingly enough, we don't even know how to define this problem yet. We don't know the right quantitative description for complexity. This is very early days. This is Copernicus, not even Kepler, much less Galileo or Newton. This is guessing at the ways to think about these problems.

SEAN CARROLL is a research professor at Caltech and the author of The Particle at the End of the Universe, which won the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize, and From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. He has recently been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Gemant Award from the American Institute of Physics, and the Emperor Has No Clothes Award from the Freedom From Religion Foundation.Sean Carroll's Edge Bio Page

LAYERS OF REALITY

I've always studied the laws of physics. I've always been curious about how the universe works, where it comes from, what are the rules that govern the behavior of the universe at the deepest level, so I do physics for a living. I study cosmology and the Big Bang and what happened before the Big Bang, if anything. It's a system of things that hooks up in very complicated ways to our human scale lives. There's the natural world that scientists study, and we human beings are part of the natural world.

In modern science, and I include the humanities here, science in a German sense of science—rigorous scholarship across all domains—in modern science we've gotten used to the idea that science doesn't offer meaning in the way that institutional religions did in the past. I'm increasingly thinking that this idea that modernity puts us in a world without meaning—philosophers have banged on about this for a century-and-a-half—may be completely wrong. We may be living in an intellectual building site, where a new story is being constructed. It's vastly more powerful than the previous stories because it's the first one that is global. It's not anchored in a particular culture or a particular society. This is an origin story that works for humans in Beijing as well as in Buenos Aires.

It's a global origin story, and it sums over vastly more information than any early origin story. This is very, very powerful stuff. It's full of meaning. We're now at the point where, across so many domains, the amount of information, of good, rigorous ideas, is so rich that we can tease out that story.

DAVID CHRISTIAN is Professor of History, Macquarie University, Sydney; Author, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. David Christian's Edge Bio Page

WE NEED A MODERN ORIGIN STORY: A BIG HISTORY

I'm a Russian historian, and I love teaching Russian history. I taught it during the Cold War when it seemed exceptionally significant. Teaching it in Australia, where I was, was a bit like talking about the dark side. I felt my students needed to know about that world.

I'm not Russian, but I was teaching Russian history and eventually I realized I was giving the subliminal message that humans are divided, at a fundamental level, into competing tribes. Having lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, I remember it vividly. I was a schoolboy in England where this tribalism threatened to blow us all up. That was a very vivid experience for me. I thought, for historians to keep teaching this subliminal message—that we're divided by tribes—is not a good thing.

JB: It all started with a young scientist named Laurie Santos at a conference that I ran saying, “How do we get rid of some of these ideas that are just standing in front of us? Just blocking everybody?”

LP: What are the ideas that blind us now do you think? And blind us into confusion, and argument, and that kind of controversy?

JB: Name a field. ... It comes down to: is science advertising or is it argument?

LP: Your favorite. Which would be one of yours?

JB: Daniel Kahneman has studied human rationality and found out that characteristics we thought we had as humans aren’t necessarily the case. We are not Homo Economicus, we’re not the rational human beings we thought we were. A lot of what we do is pre-conscious and without acknowledgement.

LP: Now that’s interesting. So that’s a big idea about who we are and how we control our lives with rationality and free will. Another idea was the idea of love as well. This is one that attracts criticism from one of your contributors. So tell us a bit more about that. ...

The reasons why I'm engaged in trying to lower the existential risks has to do with the fact that I'm a convinced consequentialist. We have to take responsibility for modeling the consequences of our actions, and then pick the actions that yield the best outcomes. Moreover, when you start thinking about—in the pallet of actions that you have—what are the things that you should pay special attention to, one argument that can be made is that you should pay attention to areas where you expect your marginal impact to be the highest. There are clearly very important issues about inequality in the world, or global warming, but I couldn't make a significant difference in these areas.

JAAN TALLINN is a co-founder of The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at University of Cambridge, UK as well as The Future of Life Institute in Cambridge, MA. He is also a founding engineer of Kazaa and Skype. Jaan Tallinn's Edge Bio Page

INTRODUCTION
by Max Tegmark

I find Jaan Tallinn remarkable in more ways than one. His rags-to-riches entrepreneur story is inspiring in its own right, starting behind the Iron Curtain and ending up connecting the world with Skype. How many times have you skyped? How many people do you know who created a new verb?

Most successful entrepreneurs I know went on to become serial entrepreneurs. In contrast, Jaan chose a different path: he asked himself how he could leverage his success to do as much good as possible in the world, developed a plan, and dedicated his life to it. His ambition makes even the goals of Skype seem modest: reduce existential risk, i.e., the risk that we humans do something as stupid as go extinct due to poor planning.

Already after a few short years, Jaan’s impact is remarkable. He is a key supporter of a global network of non-profit existential risk organizations including The Future of Humanity Institute, The Machine Intelligence Research Institute, The Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at University of Cambridge, and The Future of Life Institute, the last two of which he co-founded.

I’ve had the pleasure to work with him on The Future of Life Institute from day one, and if you’ve heard of our recent conference, open letter and well-funded research program on keeping artificial intelligence beneficial, then I’d like to make clear that none of this would have happened if it weren’t for Jaan’s support. If you’re an intelligent life form reading this text millions of years from now and marvel at how life is flourishing, you may owe your existence to Jaan.

I split my activity between various organizations. I don't have one big umbrella organization that I represent. I use various commercial organizations and investment companies such as Metaplanet Holdings, which is my primary investment vehicle,to invest in various startups, including artificial intelligence companies. Then I have one nonprofit foundation called Solenum Foundation that I use to support various so-called existential risk organizations around the world.

"To accomplish the extraordinary, you must seek extraordinary people."

A new generation of artists, writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses, might create an abundance of new flowers and fruit and trees and birds to enrich the ecology of our planet. Most of these artists would be amateurs, but they would be in close touch with science, like the poets of the earlier Age of Wonder. The new Age of Wonder might bring together wealthy entrepreneurs ... and a worldwide community of gardeners and farmers and breeders, working together to make the planet beautiful as well as fertile, hospitable to hummingbirds as well as to humans. —Freeman Dyson

Every year since 1999, we have hostedThe Edge Annual Dinner(sometimes referred to as “The Billionaires' Dinner”). Guests have included the leading third culture intellectuals of our time, dining and conversing with the founders of Amazon, AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Space X, Skype, and Twitter. It is a remarkable gathering of outstanding minds—the people who are rewriting our global culture.

Through such gatherings, its online publications, master classes, and seminars, Edge, operating under the umbrella of the non-profit 501 (c) (3) Edge Foundation, Inc., promotes interactions between the third culture intellectuals and technology pioneers of the post-industrial, digital age, the "worldwide community of gardeners and farmers and breeders" referred to by Dyson as the leaders of the "Age of Wonder”. Edge members share the boundaries of their knowledge and experience with each other and respond to challenges, comments, criticisms, and insights. The constant shifting of metaphors, the intensity with which we advance our ideas to each other—this is what intellectuals do. Edge draws attention to the larger context of intellectual life.

An indication of Edge's role in contemporary culture can be measured, in part, by its Google PageRank of "8", which places it in the same category as The Economist, Financial Times, Le Monde, LaRepubblica, Science, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Its influence is evident from the attention paid by the global media:

Perhaps the closest resemblance is to the early nineteenth century Lunar Society of Birmingham (1765), an informal dinner club and learned society of leading cultural figures of the new industrial age—James Watt, Joseph Priestly, Benjamin Franklin, and the two grandfathers of Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood. The Society met each month near the full moon. They referred to themselves as "lunaticks". In a similar fashion, Edge attempts to inspire conversations exploring the themes of the post-industrial age.

With This Idea Must Die (2015) barely off the presses, Brockman, editor of the online science salon Edge.org, asked the world's intellectuals for another opinion. They deliver in the latest of the editor's thick compendiums.

Occasionally turgid academic prose rarely mars the nearly 200 lively essays (few of which go beyond five pages) on the future of artificial intelligence. Every contributor—scholars, philosophers, artists, scientists, and journalists, including stars such as Freeman Dyson, Stephen Pinker, Brian Eno, and Daniel Dennett—knows that humans can already make a thinking machine in less than a year. Since the process obeys the laws of nature, a thinking computer is possible and, therefore, inevitable. Some observers—but none in this book—predict that Armageddon will follow. Computers only compute. They have no aspirations, and they won't consider eternal questions or their own self-interests unless programmers design them to do so. Most believe that as computers grow smarter, so will humans. That they will enslave us is less likely than that we will internalize their functions. This is already happening—e.g., if we forget our cellphones or the Internet is down, we feel bereft. The oldest contributor, Dyson, grumbles that AI is a trendy subject that receives more attention than it deserves. He points out (and few contributors disagree) that true thinking machines will not appear in the foreseeable future. "If I am wrong, as I often am, any thoughts I might have on the question are irrelevant," he writes. "If I am right, then the whole question is irrelevant." Other contributors include Mario Livio, Sean Carroll, Douglas Coupland, Nicholas Carr, Nina Jablonski, and Maria Popova.

A satisfying experience for readers looking for thoughtful answers to big questions.

We used to think that the sun revolved around the earth and that the earth was flat. These ideas have been thrown into the trash. But who throws outdated ideas like IQ, free will and essentialism in the bin?

Scientific Weed (***)
The book "Scientific Weed" collects 179 Edge.org persistent ideas that block progress. A book full of interesting observations from top scientists about their field. ...

Jean Pigozzi, the venture capitalist and art collector, was lounging by the pool at his villa in Cap d’Antibes early this month, enjoying a rare break from what he calls “the circuit.”

After attending the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, he flew to the TED ideas conference in Vancouver, mingling with the likes of Yuri Milner, the tech investor, and Larry Page of Google at the “billionaires’ dinner.” Next came the art auctions in New York and the Cannes Film Festival, where he threw a pool party attended by Woody Allen, Uma Thurman and the billionaire Paul Allen. ...

“We go all around the world to see some of the same people,” Mr. Pigozzi said. “It’s a circuit. There are a lot of parties, sure. But you’d be surprised at how much business gets done.”

The new rich have developed their own annual migration pattern. While the wealthy of the past traveled mainly for leisure and climate — the ocean breezes of New England in the summer and the sunny golf greens of Palm Beach in winter — today’s rich crisscross the globe almost monthly in search of access, entertainment and intellectual status. Traveling in flocks of private G5 and Citation jets, they have created a new social calendar of economic conferences, entertainment events, exclusive parties and art auctions. And in the separate nation of the rich, citizens no longer speak in terms of countries. They simply say, “We’ll see you at Art Basel.” ...

...The calendar is a closed loop of access because the rich want to be seen, he said, but only by one another. With outrage over inequality driving more wealth underground, flashy spending and public hedonism have become less fashionable in very wealthy circles. Yet the competition for status among newly minted billionaires has never been stronger. ...

“It’s the ‘birds of a feather’ phenomenon,” said Patrick Gallagher, head of sales for NetJets. “These events give them a sense of security and of belonging. It’s people of similar tastes and similar interests.”

In fact, so many rich people have been joining the circuit that Mr. Pigozzi said a new “supercircuit” is emerging, one that has V.I.P. events within the V.I.P. events. At the TED conference, the aptly named “billionaires’ dinner” held nearby has become the most sought-after ticket."

Machines can imitate perfectly some of the ways humans think all of the time, and can consistently outperform humans on certain thinking tasks all of the time, but computing machines, as usually envisioned, will not get right human thinking all of the time because they actually process information in ways opposite to humans in domains commonly associated with human creativity. ...

Dawkins is mostly unconcerned by the possible damage he has inflicted on his reputation, but he has moments of self-doubt. “I genuinely don’t know whether I’m going about it the right way,” he said, in the half-resigned tone of someone who probably couldn’t go about it any other way. Recently, there have been some signs of reputational management – in a video interview on his “Vision of Life” for the Edge website [https://edge.org/conversation/richard_dawkins-this-is-my-vision-of-life], he discussed Darwinian natural selection without once mentioning his anti-religious campaigning. His memoirs, he pointed out, bypassed his various online wrangles entirely. In conversation, Dawkins seemed concerned that an article about him would draw disproportionately on his Twitter feed – in his eyes, an insignificant late chapter in the context of his whole career. “I’m a scientist,” he said, as if this fact might be forgotten.

“Ultimately, will his net impact be positive?” Krauss asked. “I think the answer’s yes. For all the intelligentsia and all the people who are offended, I see a much larger audience that I hadn’t appreciated for whom these issues are brand new.” He meant people like Arori Newton, a 24-year-old Kenyan lawyer who thanked Dawkins for his books on Twitter one afternoon. The God Delusion, Newton said in an email, “changed my life completely. It occurred to me, for the first time, that I was a Christian simply because I had been born into a Christian family, not because I had made a conscious choice.” Now Newton was buying copies for all his friends.

Perhaps a culture needs someone like Dawkins: his unswerving commitment to a cause, his enormous capacity to inflame and offend. Daniel Dennett, a keen sailor, described Dawkins as his “sacrificial anode” – the hunk of zinc you bolt to the propeller shaft on a boat to protect the propeller from being eroded by seawater. The zinc is gradually worn away while the propeller remains unscathed. “In life you always want somebody out to the left of you to take the heat.”

It seems increasingly likely that we will one day build machines that possess superhuman intelligence. We need only continue to produce better computers—which we will, unless we destroy ourselves or meet our end some other way. We already know that it is possible for mere matter to acquire “general intelligence”—the ability to learn new concepts and employ them in unfamiliar contexts—because the 1,200 cc of salty porridge inside our heads has managed it. There is no reason to believe that a suitably advanced digital computer couldn’t do the same. ...

Over at Edge, John Brockman features British historian David Christian on the need to come up with a new origin story that can serve the global community.

Christian, the author of This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity, started his career as a professor of Russian history, and over the years as he refined his lectures on the Cold War, he realized…

…I was giving the subliminal message that humans are divided, at a fundamental level, into competing tribes. Having lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, I remember it vividly. I was a schoolboy in England where this tribalism threatened to blow us all up. That was a very vivid experience for me. I thought, for historians to keep teaching this subliminal message—that we’re divided by tribes—is not a good thing.

So Christian began a program to teach ‘big history’–the story of the whole world, from the Big Bang up to the present day. The goal: to help transcend the tribalisms perpetuated by narrower ethnic and religious histories. ...

We all know that computers can sometimes automate work, taking jobs away from humans. But it can augment human workers as well, making them more effective. In our ongoing research, we’ve found that so far augmentation is far more common, even in the emerging area of “cognitive computing,” in which machines can sense, comprehend, and even act on their own. In this sense, cognitive computing is more about “Person and Machine” than “Person versus Machine.”

But our view grows out of our observations of organizational applications available today. What about in the future?

For well-informed prognostication, it’s helpful to turn to the brain trust at Edge.org. Each year, Edge.org publishes essays from thinkers, scholars, and researchers on a question related to a hot topic in public and academic discourse. This year’s question was, “What do you think about machines that think?” It prompted 186 respondents to write more than 130,000 words total.

While the essays looked at a range of issues, a number of respondents touched on advances in how thinking machines could augment human intelligence. They discussed carefully-considered forms of human-machine interaction, many of which have implications to various businesses and industries including management, health, and creative fields. These answers help us to imagine what the future of computer-augmented work will look like, and what the challenges are to getting there. ...

Why you should read it: What if you could get some of the world's leading scientists and philosophers in a room and ask them what scientific idea is most inhibiting progress for humanity? This is basically that in book form. I'll admit some of the more highly-technical scientific answers have flown over my head, but this book is really making me think.

Seriously. Writing in the recently published book What Should We Be Worried About?, senior astronomer Dr Seth Shostak admits this "sounds like shabby science fiction, but even if the probability of disaster is low, the stakes are high." ...

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